Topic: Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP. - page 76. (Read 2032247 times)

I'm sorry but you "community" retards and your hubris are really a sight to behold.

Of course Reddit is not home to a balanced debate, it is filled to the brim with ignorant partisanism, fear mongering and general disingenuous pitchfork branding.

If you are looking for "balanced debate" look no further than the next message on the mailing list linked in OP.

People willing to have reasonable discussions have long realized that reddit is just another shill populist playground. Stop confusing this echo chamber with anything resembling "consensus".

It is important to understand that units of a settlement network represent money, they are money. If settlement is achieved, then those units represent a monetary base. In our existing system, cash and central bank credit represent this base layer of money and, as such, the settlement layer.

On the other hand, saying something is a payment network simply means it's units represent credit -- i.e, temporary placeholders for money. So when you send someone money using a credit card, the reason it happens so quickly is because the network is promising to settle later. That isn't to say that credit units don't have value, just that their value derives from the fact that, ultimately, they can be exchanged for more trustworthy forms of value.

So the goal of a payment network is really to provide utility. If the utility fails, people move to another payment network. The goal of a settlement networks, on the other hand, is provide confidence/trust. If confidence fails, the currency collapses.

In the current financial system, central banks represent the settlement layer, whereas companies like Visa represent payment network layers. No one really cares that Visa is a company, its power centralized, because its role is to provide utility. But that central banks -- also centralized institutions -- control the settlement layer, i.e., control base money, is deeply troubling to many people because the role of the settlement layer is to provide confidence and trust (and it is becoming increasingly hard to trust a tiny handful of unelected people).

Some people think the success of Bitcoin is going to come from its utility and they tend to favor increasing the block size. The problem is that in increasing that utility, you are also weakening the settlement layer of Bitcoin by increasing mining centralization and eroding trust. They don't see a problem because they are thinking of Bitcoin solely in terms of utility, like Visa.

But if Bitcoin is going to become a global money, then its settlement layer is far more important than its utility, assuming utility functions -- like the number of transactions the network can handle -- can be handled/processed by third parties. In the same way Visa doesn't erode confidence in the dollar simply because it is a third party company independent of central banks and governments, companies that provide more utility to the Bitcoin network won't erode confidence in it either. All that is important for confidence is the base money, the settlement layer, in the same way that confidence in fiat currencies depends on confidence in government and central banks. We don't expect governments and central banks to provide the utility of payment networks, just to provide confidence and trust that gives the underlying currency value.

Bitcoin's power is really going to come from confidence in the network, specifically in its decentralized nature. I know many people have begun to question how important decentralization is, but they don't tend to impress me as really understanding how essential trust is to money, they take it for granted. (Or they don't think the goal of Bitcoin should be to be a money.)

Without decentralization, for a money to retain value the central authority controlling that money must be trusted, which is precisely why all money today is (at least theoretically) controlled by the state (governments are the institutional power we trust most). A currency whose trust foundation is not dependent on a human institution, however, is intrinsically more trustworthy than even the state. Nevertheless, if decentralization fails and centralization occurs, then Bitcoin becomes vulnerable as those centralized powers can be easily targeted. If it becomes vulnerable, confidence erodes and people return to wanting state-run money, perhaps now in the form of Fed-coin.
As faith in central banks and institutional/human controlled money wanes and fades in the 21st century, I believe block chains are going to replace central banks. But cryptocurrencies that are controlled by an institution -- whose code can be changed by dictate because mining is over centralized -- will suffer the same loss of confidence that central banks face. The 21st century is the century of decentralized power, not of top-down institutional power of the 20th century model.

Bitcoin cannot succeed on the basis of utility alone for the simple reason that that utility can be replicated by other institutions. Its success depends on its ability to do what even imitation coins cannot. Fedcoin, IMFcoin, whatever institution you like can ultimately make a Bitcoin replacement with all the same utility. What they can't make is a coin that gets its trust layer from no institution.
Put simply, if Bitcoin isn't decentralized, then it will be replaced by a centralized cryptocurrency whose central authority we trust (more than whoever is running Bitcoin). If it is decentralized then the financial system is slowly going to migrate to it because it is inherently more trustworthy as a settlement layer.

The reason Bitcoin succeeds is not because of utility alone. The reason Bitcoin succeeds is because the settlement layer, the foundation of money, cannot be replicated by institutional power, and that is for the simple reason that Bitcoin is post-institutional. It is not controlled by any power, it is decentralized, and this makes it inherently more trustworthy. So its deep value comes from this decentralization, and it is this decentralization that ultimately makes it competitive and potentially the foundation for a new global financial system!

Every effort should be being made into increasing this decentralization . . . instead we are doing just the opposite.

Desperate to keep up the appearance of this being a balanced debate, when in fact the opposite is true.

interesting tactics employed by /u/mmeijeri et al in this thread:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3fhik9/mike_hearn_outlines_the_most_compelling_arguments/

initially, all his comments got downvoted (seen down lower the thread) as the pro increase concensus set in.  then, he takes the tactic of sub-commenting (spamming) the top comment to push all his downvoted comments downwards so as to discourage casual readers from making it all the way down to the bottom where the real content is.  couple that with some support that came in with upvoting him and he suddenly looks like he's carrying the day in terms of sentiment.

Mike must be reading this thread because these are the arguments I and others have made right here all along. And, we're right;

http://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2015-July/009815.html

There is no 33.5MB limit, that is at most a minor programming problem. Just read the rfc for the tcp protocol, there is no limit. Daily, people exchange larger blocks of data between computers. I sense a block minimalist creating a new non-limit to choke bitcoin for the benefit of an altcoin.

The tcp buffer limit is 33554432 bytes (33.5MB) which means that Bitcoin messages cannot exceed this or p2p transmission breaks at the receiver with a read error.
If the 1MB limit did not exist then this is the maximum block size that can be sent, and it is no good mining a block too large to send anywhere. Blocks not fitting in memory or swap is not the immediate restriction.

Jeff Garzik commented that increasing this limit means a major reworking of Bitcoin's p2p protocol. If anyone thinks that the 1MB hardfork is scary (which is a tiny software change) resolving the 33.5MB is a much bigger issue. It may never be done, because one or more of alternative options:

LN having enough block space to allow a *lot* of payment channels to function and the VISA-scale volumes do-able long-term.
Tier Nolan / Adam Back extension blocks are one solution when the 33.5MB limit is being approached,
A combination of IBLT (if it is efficient at this level) and block segmentation logic could allow disk blocks > 33.5MB

In the meantime (and I'm guilty in the past too) bitcointalk is full of comments about 100MB, ZOMG 1GB blocks, etc etc and "dangerous" unlimited block sizes, when the reality is that no block can exist > 33.5 MB even if the 1MB limit disappeared.

When Satoshi put in the 1MB it was 1000x larger than the average block size. The 33.5 is about 80x the average block size seen in 2015. This is large, but not stupidly large, and continuing improvements in computing tech and bandwidth should make this size manageable by the mid-2020s because 5MB blocks should be manageable today.

A road-map which permits 33.5MB blocks by about 2025 still allows Bitcoin to be a major global currency. BIPs 100 and 101 at least leave the opportunity open to make this possible.

Unfortunately, eliminating the limit would open up the existing code bases to several of DOS attacks. If we really want to go that way, we need to make sure that all the software can handle blocks that won't fit in memory + swap.  There are also likely other technical issues that would need to be addressed, and the only way to tease them all out is a ton of code reading and testing.  When software is written, constants are treated as assumptions, and when that assumption changes there is a risk of the previous logic breaking down.

If there is no difference, why are we debating? Why don't the miners just raise the limit?

Oh yeah, because that would break all clients that haven't been updated.  This would fracture the ecosystem.  There would suddenly be 2 blockchains called Bitcoin.

The difference is that as long as a coded limit exists, despite all our efforts to eliminate centralization, we still need a centralized place to communicate when consensus has been reached so that everyone can adjust.

Eliminating the limit would arguably reduce the need for centralized communication, but the same argument could be made for any loosening of the consensus rules.

Unfortunately, eliminating the limit would open up the existing code bases to several of DOS attacks. If we really want to go that way, we need to make sure that all the software can handle blocks that won't fit in memory + swap.  There are also likely other technical issues that would need to be addressed, and the only way to tease them all out is a ton of code reading and testing.  When software is written, constants are treated as assumptions, and when that assumption changes there is a risk of the previous logic breaking down.

A hard limit, to some of you, seems to be only consensus written into the running code of the nodes. But, anyone can modify his node as he pleases. The repository is not really protected, because anyone can clone it, modify it, and even offer the modification as a branch. That is how git works, by the way, but the crucial thing is that the software is avaiable, not secret, the essence of being free software.

So there is no fundamental difference between a relative consensus using code, and no coded limit and relative consensus using discourse over the social media which includes this medium, or other out of band channels.

There is no such things like Bitcoin with 100x capacity. The security trade-off is disproportionate with the incremental amount of txs you can process.

You have it exactly backwards, MN subsetting is tens of thousands of times more secure than PoW.

If there are 600 compromised nodes out of 3000, and you need 10 of those 3000 to beat the system, the chances that all of the 10 needed nodes for any one IX will be among the 600 compromised nodes are miniscule.

There's a reason hierarchical structures arise in nature and society - efficiency. Societal hierarchies are easy targets for compromise because they are essentially static, they provide fixed targets. Pooled mining is a good example of an this, it's a vulnerability, not an asset.

Overlay networks like Masternodes are a fluid hierarchy and vastly more resilient to attack.

Fine, well then find a solution and make it work instead of "whining"